Blog Review: Dec. 11

By Ed Sperling - 11 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 0

Synopsys’ Brent Gregory has developed a career growth checklist for computer science majors. They should hang this in the hallway at universities. Cadence’s Brian Fuller interviews Saar Drimer, a UK hardware engineer who has been experimenting with odd-shaped PCBs. According to Drimer, 45-degree angles aren’t always optimal. But what happens to all the expensive tools everyone has bee... » read more

The Path To Power Signoff Is Getting Longer

By Ed Sperling - 06 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 0

Signoff on power used to be a fairly simple check-the-box kind of activity. Even if power budgets weren’t exactly met, they could usually be fixed in future iterations of a chip, whether that involved derivatives or new revs of the same chip. A number of things have changed since the much simpler days of 45/40nm and above, however. Power is now a market differentiator. In many cases, i... » read more

What’s Next For Power Optimization

By Brian Bailey - 05 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 1

Today it is difficult to find a design that does not consider some kind of power optimization. Mobile needs it to preserve battery life, data centers need it to reduce operating cost, and many are finding they need it to meet tougher regulatory requirements. In a survey conducted two years ago, there was no segment of the industry that was not taking a serious look at reducing their power profi... » read more

New Challenges Emerge With FinFETs

By Ed Sperling - 05 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 0

Working at advanced process nodes is always tricky. There are new things to worry about and more rules to deal with initially, yet the promised benefit is improved performance, power and area, or cost. But at the next process node, and the one after that, there are so many variables coming into play that trying to make sense of the PPA equation is becoming much more difficult. Early reports ... » read more

Door Busters In Low Power Optimization

By Mark Baker - 05 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 1

The holiday season is upon us, notably a shortened gift buying season at that, which for some only adds to the anxiety felt at this time of year. Many shoppers are out there searching for a door buster deal on that “hot item,” but choices must be made on where to allocate one’s time. Should one stop with the door buster deals or take the time to look further for more practical or traditio... » read more

SpyGlass Flow For Xilinx FPGA

By Various Writers - 04 Dec, 2013 - Comments: 0

As the cost of doing ASIC design skyrockets, FPGAs are becoming an attractive alternative for system-on-chip (SoC) types of design. Large numbers of increasingly complex designs are now done with FPGAs, making verification a major task. Besides the usual issues of width mismatch, connectivity or synthesis-simulation mismatch, there are also problems related to multiple asynchronous clock domain... » read more

Experts At The Table: What’s Next?

By Ed Sperling - 21 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 1

Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Jim Hogan, long-time industry venture capitalist; Simon Bloch, senior director at Samsung Electronics; Sumit DasGupta, formerly Si2 senior vice president of engineering; and Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at eSilicon (VP of corporate marketing at Atrenta when this roundtable was held). What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: What... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 13

By Ed Sperling - 13 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 0

Synopsys’ Brent Gregory digs into optimal paths—in this case between the bakery, the library and another store. This is the classic traveling salesman equation, but with a large sales staff and lots of stops. Mentor’s Michael Ford points to the gap between supply-chain and shop-floor management solutions. This is yet another example of thinking outside the package—and maybe the enti... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of Verification

By Ed Sperling - 11 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of verification with Janick Bergeron, Synopsys fellow; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for the Cadence System Development Suite; Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent; and Yunshan Zhu, vice president of new technologies at Atrenta. What foll... » read more

What Do Timing Constraints Have To Do With Clock Domain Crossing?

By Ramesh Dewangan - 07 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 0

As the complexity of designs has scaled, the need for complete and accurate timing constraints (defined typically as Synopsys Design Constraints or SDC) has become extremely critical. High quality timing constraints not only reduce the total effort required to achieve timing closure, but also reduce the number of iterations during that process. In the worst case, incorrect timing constraints ca... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

Key Technologies To Extend EUV To 14 Angstroms

Alongside high-NA EUV will be better-performing photoresists, reduced roughness using passivation and etch, and lateral etching to reduce tip-to-tip dimensions.

by Laura Peters

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.

by Bryon Moyer

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